The Trail Camera Took Forty Photos Of Nothing And One Of Something

I put the camera out for foxes. I am not a hunter. I like foxes.

It takes a frame on motion and a frame every minute regardless, which is a setting I chose because I like time-lapses, and which turned out to matter.

The night of 14 November, the camera took forty consecutive minute-frames of an empty clearing. Nothing moving. No fox, no deer, nothing.

Frame 41 is the same clearing, same light, same everything, with a face in it.

It is at the right of the frame, at the height of a branch that I know for a fact I cannot reach, and I am six foot one and I have stood there and tried.

The face is not clear. I want to be honest, because I have watched what happens to people online who oversell a picture. It is grainy, it is monochrome infrared, and the eyes are just eyeshine, which every animal has.

But the head is the wrong shape for a bear. The head is too high and too narrow and the shoulders — there is a suggestion of shoulders, sloped and enormous — are not in a bear place.

Frame 42, one minute later: empty clearing.

Nothing else all night. No approach frames. No departure frames. On a camera that fires on motion.

That is what actually keeps me up: not the face. The absence of frames 40a and 41a. It arrived without triggering motion and it left without triggering motion, and it stood there long enough to be in a scheduled frame.

I took the camera down. I did not put it back up. My wife says I have been strange about the woods since, and she is right, and I have not told her why, because I would have to show her the photo, and then it would be in her head as well, and there is no version of that which makes her life better.

I have the SD card in a drawer.

I take it out about twice a year, look at frame 41, and put it back.